What is the role of emotion in social life?

Emotions are inextricable from the fabric of our social lives. Emotions serve as powerful signals for communicating and coordinating with other people. My work unpacks these inherent social dimensions of emotion to understand how people express their own emotions, interpret others’ emotions, and use emotions to guide their behaviour in interactions with others.

Key Publications

  • Teoh, Y. Y., & FeldmanHall, O. (submitted). Deviations from normative emotion representation predict social and affective dysfunction. [Preprint]
  • Teoh, Y. Y., & Hutcherson, C. A. (2025). Value computations underpin flexible emotion expression. Communications Psychology. [PDF]
  • Teoh, Y. Y., Cunningham, W. A., & Hutcherson, C. A. (2023). Framing subjective emotion reports as dynamic affective decisions. Affective Science. [PDF]

How do people optimize information for social behavior?

Other people are enigmas. How do they feel? What do they want? Can we trust them? Our ability to navigate our complex social worlds where there are hundreds if not thousands of other people in our networks depend on relevant information about these people. My work investigates how people optimize search for information about others and maximize this limited information by inferring structural patterns that fill in the gaps of their knowledge.

Key Publications

  • Teoh, Y. Y.*, Son, J.-Y.*, Xia, A., Bhandari, A., & FeldmanHall, O. (2026). Medial temporal lobe encodes cognitive maps of real-world social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. *equal contribution [PDF][Preprint]
  • Teoh, Y. Y., Cho, H., & Hutcherson, C. A. (2025). Information prioritization underpins the flexible expression of social preferences under time constraints. Social Psychological and Personality Science. [PDF]
  • Teoh, Y. Y., & Hutcherson, C. A. (2022). The games we play: Prosocial choices under time pressure reflect context-sensitive information priorities. Psychological Science. [PDF]
  • Teoh, Y. Y., Yao, Z., Cunningham, W. A., & Hutcherson, C. A. (2020). Attentional priorities drive effects of time pressure on altruistic choice. Nature Communications. [PDF]